My Turn: All about Laura

When I lived in the Toledo area, I attended a writers’ group a few times and one time after a meeting, I got talking to a gal about our favorite writers.

We were about to break up the conversation and head our separate ways when she looked me straight in the eye and said that she bet I was a Laura Ingalls Wilder fan.

Bingo – she was dead-on correct.

I still remember when I discovered the “Little House” books. I was 10 years old and had been reading “chapter” books for awhile. At the public library, I was reading my way through the alphabet when one winter afternoon I found myself at the letter “W.”

I remember pulling a book off the shelf and on the cover saw two pioneer girls in bonnets staring out the back of a covered wagon with a dog running beneath it. I checked that book out and once I started reading “Little House on the Prairie”

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I barely put it down until I finished it. Afterwards, I noticed that this book was the second in a series and I went back for the first book and so on until I had read the set.

After that I was all about Laura. I wanted my own set of “Little House” books; I wanted to know more about her life; and I wanted to travel where she trod even though I entered this world almost 100 years after she did.

I was excited about the TV show when it first arrived, but soon got bored with it as it strayed from the books in order to stay on the air and retain its audience. I’m one of those who generally likes the book better than the movie or TV show.

The best thing about my Laura days, however, was when I discovered that her home in Mansfield, Mo., had been turned into a museum. That’s where I begged to go on vacation when I was 11. My parents indulged me, partly because my dad had been on a business trip to St. Louis and wanted to go back and explore that city some more.

We spent a week in Missouri, where, little did I know at the time, I would be back in a few years to go to college and spend the first three years of my journalism career.

It was in Mansfield that I saw Pa’s fiddle and other treasures from Laura’s life and collected the last books to complete my “Little House” set.

Those books still can be found prominently placed on my bookshelf and, yes, I have read them through several times as an adult. I often turn to them in times of trouble and sadness in my life. I read them after my dad died. During those days, I could almost hear the strains of Pa’s fiddle as he played for his girls to entertain them or calm their fears and comfort me in my time of grief.

Laura’s stories inspired me as well to be a bit of a pioneer in my field when I took up sportswriting at a time when there were few women doing that.

Even though she was writing about pioneer days that were long gone by the time I was reading her stories, they still resonated with my life, especially when she and I were teenagers and everything with our families and friends had fallen into a comfortable place. As much as we wished it would never change, we knew it would.

There is no stopping growing up as Laura realized when she so loved her life with Ma and Pa and her sisters, Mary, Carrie and Grace.

I found that out, too. When I got to appreciate my brothers and sister, in too short a time, we were flung out into the four winds, going off to college and new jobs, getting married and having families.

At this moment, there is no great sadness, grief or trouble in my life, but I am feeling a little nostalgic for the “Little House” books. I may just have to put them back on my already overcrowded reading list just so I can hear Pa’s fiddle and feel the wagon sway beneath me as it follows two faint tracks out on the prairie.

— Cathy Landry is editor of the Gaylord Herald Times. Contact her at 732-1111 or cathy@gaylordheraldtimes.com.